In 1979, the Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge) began the Recruitment into Engineering of High Ability Minority Students program (REHAMS). The purpose of the program was to give students a head start in their college courses while providing them with an opportunity for counseling and tutoring. To balance the curriculum's scientific emphasis and lessen pressure on students surviving in a predominantly white institution, a writing course based on tagmemic rhetoric was incorporated into the curriculum. Using linguistic and anthropological observations of how people of various cultures come to understand the world and overcome differences in their perceptions of that world, the course required students to acknowledge their problematic situations in three prewriting actions. First, students chose paper topics on problematic situations they faced. Second, students stated the problem they planned to explore in their paper. Third, students used tagmemics in considering their problems from the perspective of particle, wave, and field. All three actions helped students to think and write comprehensively but precisely about things that bothered them such as their alienation from the mainstream of students and faculty and possible scholastic troubles as a result of that alienation. (HOD)